Discover your city. Record your experiences. STAMP is a new mobile platform that helps you find the best places in your town or city. STAMPs are short geo-tagged video reviews, created by our users, for our users. Join our closed alphaand start creating great content at your favourite locations now.

Yeh yeh yeh, I know I know. After a great run of weekly journal entries, i've let it slip. Don't hate me. The festive period is a busy time okay! And in-between all the eating, drinking and present giving, there's not been much time to sit down and pen an update.

So as I sit here, on a chilly January morning, i'm wracking my brain for what's been going on here at STAMP HQ.

Well in the last couple of weeks, our alpha testers have been hard at work. Perhaps with all the Christmas parties going on recently, people have been going out more and fortunately for us have been inclined to whip out their phone and fire up the app. A few bugs and crashes aside, our users have been able to create great STAMPs without too much disappointment.

We've seen new locations being added in London, Leeds, Harrogate and even all the way down in Swanage (according to Google it's a small town near Dorset). And it's not just restaurants and drinking holes people are adding and STAMPing. We've seen museums, coffee-shops, independent bike shops and...surprisingly...a Nando's. (Question of the day: What do you think about chains like Nando's appearing on the STAMP platform?)

With the content rolling in, we've decided to kick off our Instagram account (like and follow please). Here we're posting all the great videos our alpha testers have been creating in a bid to attract new users and show off the power of our platform. It's early days, but we think its a great way to utilise super informative video content for the benefit of other people who are asking themselves: "Is this the sort of place, I would want to visit?" (hopefully the answer is 'Hell yes!')

We've also started the process of sitting down with the businesses we feature and seeing what they think of the STAMP platform. Once i've dispelled the idea that i'm trying to sell them something, they seem fairly receptive to what we're doing here at STAMP. Small businesses often want videos to use for their social media or promotions, yet they lack the time, skills and expertise to create much content. So the idea of user generated video content, created at their establishment is of particular interest.

It's early days though and there are plenty more discussions to be had in the New Year.

On that note, 2017 is shaping up to be an exciting one for STAMP. If you're one of our current alpha testers, thanks for all your help in 2016 - testing out our app and identifying all the problems we need to fix (there's been a lot but we're getting through them). If you're thinking about getting involved with STAMP, head over to our landing page and sign up to our alpha programme. As we make improvements and get STAMP ready for a general release, we need as much help as we can get to create great content and add new locations to the STAMP family.

What's our New Year's resolution? Well it's a simple one. Listen and act on what our users are telling us...